


Driving Sideways

by grenadine



Category: Law & Order: SVU
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2007-02-12
Updated: 2007-02-12
Packaged: 2017-10-21 11:29:07
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,761
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/224681
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/grenadine/pseuds/grenadine
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Olivia, after and before.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Driving Sideways

**Author's Note:**

> Set throughout Season Six, post-Doubt. The third section takes place after Weak, the fourth takes place during Ghost.

 

 _and your companion  
will not help you to navigate   
for fear she may be wrong_

aimee mann::driving sideways

 

  
1.

 

On Monday morning, she brings him coffee, and he smiles at the story she tells about old college friends, and why you should never see them again after you turn thirty-five. 

He teases her as she takes a sip, frowns, and goes for another sugar packet. She can tell that he lets the smile drop from his face while her back is turned. Her shoulder blades go up a fraction, but she pretends she hasn't felt it.

Even still, in the course of their morning things seem balanced and centered. The squadroom is quiet, save for the sound of their back and forth conversation, half-sentences that don't need finishing.

They are lucky, she knows from experience, to have these quieter mornings. When they work long cases and stay up until dawn over stale Chinese, photos, and bank receipts, morning becomes a blurred stretch of time filled with the hurried push towards the solve. The end. The singularity. It's only sometimes that they manage to forget about it, their familiar cycle. Peace and chaos. Yin and yang.

Him and her.

Until the phone rings, as it does now, and the world again goes completely insane. Olivia gently sets down her mug as Elliot reaches over and answers.

"Manhattan SVU."

Yeah, she thinks, contemplating the liquid swirling around in her cup. That's us.

 

2.

 

Olivia goes running at the gym every Tuesday and Thursday before work, and turns off her cell. Elliot never comes with her, because someone has to be watching their damn office phones, but if anything happens, he waits to let her know until she gets back, and she gets one free hour to herself. Always. In return, she buys him coffee, the paper, drives more slowly when he complains.

She runs, he waits, she compromises. Usually, it seems like an equal trade, a fair deal between the two of them. Until now, it has been.

It hasn't happened all at _once_ , that's the problem. Instead, it's been like a slow oil spill crawling up a coastline, claiming pieces of the man she knew, replacing them with something darker. Now he's angrier, sadder by degrees. A world of difference from the way she found out it, quick and sharp like pulling off a Band-Aid.

Since he told her, she's caught him sleeping in the crib once or twice. It worries her. It's something she does, not him. He has a family.

Had a family, she thinks, rounding a turn on the track. No, scratch that out, too, still _does_ have a family.

She keeps bringing him coffee and hopes that it's enough. She starts taking him out for lunch, walks with him through the Park once or twice, listens to him talk in the crib sometimes, and knows that it isn't, because whatever he needs, she doesn't have it. That part of her is one she can't reach anymore, or never had, or never found.

Even when he can tell if it's raining out by the way the ends of her hair frizz, maybe, she thinks, he really doesn't know her well enough to know how to ask for what he needs.

Or he does. And he won't.

Is there someone else to ask?

As she runs, for the first time she prays that he is not as sinless as she believes him to be. If there were a lover, she thinks, at least the girl would be able to _talk_ to him, for God's sake.

Olivia stops, exhausted, and rests her palms on her knees. A moment later, she hears her pager beep, an unfamiliar sound within these concrete walls.

*

Four o'clock, Olivia waits on the other side of the glass as Elliot interrogates their suspect. She hears him crack his knuckles on the table and winces. She flips through the manila casefile, looking for something they'd missed, something that would help him in there.

She doesn't find anything.

She can hear him in there, talking low, talking close, their suspect objecting to it all: "I don't know what ya'll talkin' about! You don't know nothing, man, I ain't got nothing to do with this sh--"

Olivia turns off the speaker without looking, traces a line of witness testimony with her eyes, searching.

Still nothing. She looks up to see how he's doing, but he is in a corner, out of frame, and all she sees is her reflection in the glass. 

 

3.

 

She'd made a complete ass out of herself with this whole Rebecca Hendrix thing, so she goes out for breakfast. Alone.

Olivia has a detective's yen for reasons, so she thinks about it a while as she stirs her coffee. Rebecca. Bright, cheerful Rebecca who used to talk about splitting her life between the force and a family. Rebecca who had the names of her first three children picked out already. Who quickly got tired of the stress and the strain and the treadmill feeling of indifference that Olivia used to be immune to. Rebecca who left.

A drip of coffee works its way down her mug.

Rebecca who left _me_.

She left me, Elliot. Doesn't that mean she left us both?

*

In the afternoon, she goes through a stack of DD-5's while a part of her mind quietly hums along a different track, almost unnoticed. How? Why? Am I blameless in this? Are you?

Is she?

A familiar thought floats up out of the aether. _Don't go where I can't follow._ It's a cop's promise, and the only one they've ever needed. Her pen leaves a navy blue blot on the edge of her signature, and she rubs at it, her thumb making circles on the paper.

She's been warning him for a while, pulling back, getting more defensive, separating herself from him. It throws them off in interrogation, she knows. But. She needs to be able to to think and observe, and she can't do that when he's...  
 _  
Just don't go where I can't watch your back. I need more time. Wait._

 

4.

 

The past comes crashing back down into their lives on a Thursday. _Thursday's child has far to go_ , thinks Olivia.

"We really missed you," she says, to the tall window and the cars below.

Next to her, Alex smiles. "I know."

Alex watches traffic through the window for a while, before Olivia broaches the subject, tentatively, running her words together, _so-what-did-you-and-he-talk-about?_ Like that. Always take the opening you're given, she thinks.

Elliot taught her that.

Alex obligingly (surprisingly) spills. One backgammon game to explain what happened, and two more for her to consider the facts, while he fidgeted around and got up for a beer and sat back down and won against her both times. Then Olivia knocked, and Elliot almost shot the door off its hinges from nerves.

Alex smirks. "Would have nailed his ass, too, best of seven."

Olivia remembers how they used to be so infuriated by Alex's tendency to _consider_ , to process. They were always a much more impulsive pair, although God knows that's not the word Alex used. She twitches a smile at the window frame.

"He told me not to tell you," Alex says, so familiar in her bluntness that Olivia would swear up and down the last two years had never happened at all.

She tilts her head. "Then why are you?"

"I've always liked you better."

" _Al_ ex-"

"He doesn't want to lose you, too."

Olivia steps back from the window, shakes her head. "He hasn't."

"I know."

"He _hasn't_."

" _I_ know, Liv."

Olivia briefly feels like she's drowning, takes a sharp breath of air. "He doesn't?"

Alex looks drawn. "I don't know."

Olivia puts her hands on the windowsill, leans forward with all her strength. 

"Olivia." She doesn't answer.

"Olivia. _Liv_. C'mon. I didn't come back from the dead to watch you look out the window."

"What the _hell_ am I supposed to do?" she says, half to Alex and half to the street.

Alex turns her back to the window and sits down on the floor. She starts picking at the carpet with one hand, the other still holding the casefile, her ticket back to life. You really want it? Olivia wants to ask her. Really want to come back to this, to us? 

Of course, it wouldn't be the same. Nothing is. Olivia looks down at the second-closest friend she's ever had, who's biting her lip.

"I don't think," Alex says carefully, looking up at her, "that I'm the person who can tell you that."

 

5.

 

Canvassing bookstores Friday morning, Elliot finishes jotting in his notebook, while Olivia rummages in her coat pocket. "If you remember anything," she says, handing the wiry little owner a card, "just give us a call. Use that number, and ask for one of us."

"Your name is..." He looks confused. She curses internally, realizing that she's given him one of their old joint business cards, which states both their last names, and neither of their first.

"Detective Olivia Benson."

"Ah," says the bookstore guy, and Olivia knows just what he's going to say. "Athena's tree! The goddess of wisdom and," he chuckles, "righteous battle. Very appropriate name for a woman in your line of work."

"Thanks," she says, and pretends not to notice Elliot's startled look.

"Really?" he says, outside.

"My mother taught mythology," she says to him and the open air as they get in the car.

"I knew that," he says. "I just didn't--"

"What?"

"Nothing. Just--"

She sighs, puts on her seatbelt. Her words are matter-of-fact. "My mother gave me the name. I didn't turn out the way she wanted. She didn't--"

She twists her hands and looks away. "She didn't know when she picked it out what it would -- do to her. What I would--"

He clasps a hand over her knotted-together fingers and presses it there for a moment, starts the car, doesn't say a word.

Sometimes, Olivia thinks, when she catches her breath, it's really goddamn annoying how that always works.

"What something's called doesn't have anything to do with what it is, you know?" she says after a minute, while staring out the window at the moving cars.

His lips form a thin, tight line. "Yeah. I understand."

Olivia looks at him then, and wishes that words were easier to come by.

She says nothing, and they drive on. 

 

*  
 __

 _and she'll sit  
thinking you're going to handle it  
until she's proven wrong_

 _until you prove her wrong_

 

 


End file.
